How not to spoil the festivities ft. The Glitch & VMLY&R

With a cluttered market during the festive season, Prashant Kohli, The Glitch and Payal Vaidya, VMLY&R take us through the 'How-tos' of crafting communication that standout and bring real-time value for consumers amidst festive marketing campaigns.

To stand out amidst the festive mayhem, Prashant Kohli, Vice President - Strategy, The Glitch and Payal Vaidya, EVP, Experience Design, VMLY&R India take us through the possible ways to bring humanized, innovative solutions for brands and marketers this festive season.

Reframe Festive Marketing Campaigns

To avoid some of the recurring cliches, brands should reframe festive marketing campaigns keeping the customer at the center of the communication by understanding the problems they face. Think about the solutions you can offer as a brand or service to these problems. Once they empathize with the consumers, bring a human-centered design approach, it paves the way for richer insights and problems to work with, suggests Vaidya.

“When we start a project, there is a problem statement to deliver some goal for the campaign, the approach is business-centric. But reframing helps us to look at a problem in different ways”, she says.

Humanize The Problem Statement

Taking this a step further, the experts advise that the next step for the brands after understanding the problem statement would be to look at it with a human lens. “Humanize the problem, understand the consumers' likes, dislike, so we can think of things through their perspective”, explains Vaidya

The experts encapsulate with the following suggestions:

• Humanize the problem
• Think with a different perspective
• Question assumptions
• Deep dive into thought and feelings
• Frama a POV and intent

Further, to avoid the cliches, Kohli shares that it is about how you connect with people, emotionally. “Understand how you feel when you are with your friends and families”, he adds.

Also read: Expert Opinion: Creative framework for brands to crack festive storytelling

Reframe The Intent

Framing an intent is similar to defining an objective, shares Vaidya. Sharing joyful moments that will matter for the season through innovative ideas, coming from a human-centric approach can help brands go a long way.

While crafting festive communication for brand campaigns, it is crucial to understand your audience. Kohli puts forth that once you reframe the intent and work on the brief, you need to understand the customers while identifying their problems. “Have conversations with people to empathize in a better manner. It should give interesting framework and ideas”, he says

Way Forward

Vaidya urges marketers that after getting to the core of the consumer problem, defining the audience, and the objective, focus on the narration of the brand story, its appeal to the customers, and the ways of selling the stories to the customers with sensitivity, empathy, and relevance.

As we move forward, Kohli shares that the communication nudges at this time will become important. Instead of hard-selling of products, the ways to deploy those nudges will hold prominence in 2021. “Influencer marketing and community-driven campaigns will grow, too”, he concludes.

The speakers shared their views at the Social Samosa Presents Festive Marketing Week 2021: Day 3.

Watch the full session here: